Black Myth: Wukong is an anomaly. The game is already shattering Steam records, which is a pretty big accomplishment for a game that has seemingly been a glorified tech demo for the past four years. It doesn’t help that the game comes with some of the most demanding requirements we’ve ever seen out of a modern game. Black Myth: Wukong can push your PC to its limits, but if you’re smart with your graphics settings, you don’t need one of the best graphics cards to run it.
For the past week, I’ve been poking and prodding every corner of Black Myth: Wukong to understand how the PC version works, what it’s capable of, and where the easy performance gains are. This game will push your PC to its limits, and it’s sure to become a staple in PC hardware reviews. And that’s because it manages to push an insane level of visual fidelity while still being a game that you can, well, play.
Graphics tweaks are a must
If you were hoping to jump into Black Myth: Wukong, toggle to the highest graphics preset, and be on your way, I have bad news for you. Even with an RTX 4090, I’m not able to jump into the game will all the sliders maxed out. There’s a lot of room in the graphics options to optimize your performance, and ignoring the graphics settings will only hurt your experience in the game. Similar to Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong looks beautiful, even if you need to turn some settings down to Low.
Above, you can see how the presets scale with different graphics cards and resolutions. I used the RTX 4060 for 1080p, the RX 7800 XT for 1440p, and the RTX 4080 for 4K. The performance here is native, so upscaling isn’t turned on, and I didn’t turn on ray tracing, either. None of the GPUs I tested were able to hit 60 frames per second (fps) at their native resolution with the Cinematic or Very High preset. Even the High preset is too demanding without upscaling.
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Still, it’s clear where the big performance gains are. Cinematic and Very High are basically in lockstep, while the gains are much more pronounced between High, Medium, and Low. That provides some good guidance for how to optimize your performance in the game. Although there’s a pretty large gap in image quality between the Cinematic and Low preset, you can still get a fantastic image with much better performance with the right settings tweaks.
How I tweaked Black Myth: Wukong
After running well 100 passes of the in-game benchmark for Black Myth: Wukong, I arrived on two sets of recommended settings depending on the resolution you’re playing at. I have one set for 1080p and another for 1440p and 4K. That’s mainly because of how upscaling works in Black Myth: Wukong, and the limited performance gains you’ll see with upscaling at 1080p. More on that soon.
Starting with 1440p and 4K, here are the settings I recommend:
- Super Resolution: 58% to 75% (adjust based on frame rate)
- Super Resolution Sampling: DLSS (FSR when DLSS isn’t available)
- Frame Generation: On (switch off if lower than 45 fps before turning on)
- Full Ray Tracing: Off
- Graphics Preset: Custom
- View Distance Quality: Very High
- Anti-Aliasing Quality: Very High
- Post Effects Quality: High
- Shadow Quality: High
- Texture Quality: Very High
- Visual Effect Quality: High
- Hair Quality: Medium
- Vegetation Quality: Very High
- Global Illumination Quality: High
- Reflection Quality: Very High
I pushed the graphics settings pretty far, and that’s mainly on the back of frame generation and upscaling in Black Myth: Wukong. Most modern GPUs will have access to both, and with these higher resolutions, the upscaling slider will provide more performance gains while keeping the visual quality as high as possible. Below, you can see how my optimized settings compare to the Low and Cinematic presets. There’s more depth with the Cinematic preset, but my optimized settings aren’t far behind.
The situation is different with 1080p. There aren’t a ton of performance gains with upscaling, so you’ll need to run the game as close to native resolution as possible. Because of that, I knocked down all of the graphics settings one tier:
- Super Resolution: 80% to 100% (adjust based on frame rate)
- Super Resolution Sampling: DLSS (FSR when DLSS isn’t available)
- Frame Generation: On (switch off if lower than 45 fps before turning on)
- Full Ray Tracing: Off
- Graphics Preset: Custom
- View Distance Quality: High
- Anti-Aliasing Quality: High
- Post Effects Quality: Medium
- Shadow Quality: Medium
- Texture Quality: High
- Visual Effect Quality: Medium
- Hair Quality: Low
- Vegetation Quality: High
- Global Illumination Quality: Medium
- Reflection Quality: High
Regardless of where you settle, Black Myth: Wukong will show a red exclamation point next to any graphics settings that exceed what it recommends. Unfortunately, that also applies to upscaling. Anything about a 66% scale will throw up a flag that you’ve exceeded the recommended settings, regardless of how powerful your PC is.
Above, you can see how much extra performance you’re getting with these tweaks. Across all of the GPUs I tested and their respective resolutions, I saw about double the frame rate with these settings. This is how I’m playing through Black Myth: Wukong, and I’d suggest you do the same.
Upscaling required
I based my recommended settings around upscaling, and for good reason. Black Myth: Wukong basically requires upscaling. Similar to Alan Wake 2 and Starfield, there isn’t an option to turn upscaling off. Instead, you get a resolution slider that goes from 25% to 100%, with 100% running the game at native resolution and using the upscaler for anti-aliasing.
The game includes everything you could want. There’s AMD’s FSR 3, Nvidia’s DLSS 3, and Intel’s XeSS, as well as Unreal Engine 5’s Temporal Super Resolution (TSR). If you have access to DLSS 3, that’s the upscaler I’d recommend for both performance and image quality. FSR compromises image quality for better performance, while XeSS lags in performance but is closer to DLSS with its image quality. TSR is fine, but it’s a fallback option if you can’t use one of the other upscalers.
Above, you can see how the upscalers hold up to native resolution. This is at 4K with the Cinematic preset, and the differences become far more noticeable at lower resolutions. FSR, for instance, loses a lot of detail in the distant trees and shows some nasty ghosting on the falling leaves. XeSS maintains more detail, but it’s aggressive retention leads to shimmering, which you can see on the main character’s head. DLSS has these issues, too, make no mistake. But they’re less pronounced overall.
Given that this is 4K, it’s a best-case scenario for these upscaling utilities. Down at 1080p, FSR is downright unusable below 66% render resolution, and XeSS looks terrible below that point. Even DLSS looks bad, as it struggles to re-create the incredibly detailed world of Black Myth: Wukong with very little information to go on.
You’re not getting a huge performance boost with upscaling at 1080p, either. You can see that with the RTX 4060 in the chart above. There are performance gains, but as you decrease the internal resolution, those gains become less and less prominent. That’s because you’re putting more strain on your CPU at this very low internal resolutions, and the upscaling algorithms have to do more work to produce an image with very little data. It’s simply not worth pushing upscaling at this low of a resolution for the trade-off between performance and image quality.
Thankfully, that disappears at 1440p. I wasn’t able to test DLSS here due to using the RX 7800 XT, but the gains are much more pronounced moving between the different quality levels. More importantly, the image quality doesn’t completely fall apart when you push toward a 50% internal render resolution.
Still, 4K is where upscaling shines the most. Given how large 4K is to start, you have a ton of room to push the internal resolution down and still see performance gains. And image quality holds up since the upscalers have a lot of internal resolution information to work with, even when you push the resolution down.
Outside of upscaling, Black Myth: Wukong supports frame generation. You get DLSS 3 frame generation if you have an RTX 40-series GPU, but also FSR 3 frame generation if you don’t. Unfortunately, you can’t decouple the frame generation from the upscaling. If you want to use DLSS upscaling, for example, you can’t use FSR 3 frame generation, and vice versa. Still, both tools work excellently, and they’re a must-have you plan on running with Black Myth: Wukong‘s full ray tracing.
Tracing paths
Undoubtedly, the most demanding setting in Black Myth: Wukong is full ray tracing, otherwise known as path tracing. This is where the full lighting system uses ray tracing, and it’s much more demanding than a typical ray tracing implementation. For the difference it makes, look at the video above.
The depth you achieve with path tracing in incredible. At first, the two videos look similar, but the more you look at the small shadows, soft light bleed, and subtle reflections, you gain an appreciation for how much path tracing is really doing. Still, Black Myth: Wukong isn’t dead with path tracing off. The game still takes advantage of Unreal Engine’s software-based Lumen, so you get some of the feeling of path tracing even with the setting disabled.
You might want to disable path tracing, too. You might have to disable it. As you can see from the benchmarks above, AMD graphics cards are basically out of the question here. And for Nvidia’s latest GPUs, you are almost forced to use frame generation to achieve a playable frame rate. Path tracing is extremely demanding, and although Black Myth: Wukong provides various quality settings, they are still very taxing.
Path tracing looks incredible in Black Myth: Wukong, but there’s one problem. The game doesn’t support DLSS 3.5, so you can’t use Ray Reconstruction. This AI-powered denoiser is incredible with path tracing, as we’ve seen in Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2. It’s worth sacrificing performance for path tracing with Ray Reconstruction at work. Without it, path tracing in Black Myth: Wukong is nice to have, but you aren’t missing out on much if you turn the feature off.
8GB graphics cards are safe
I’m happy to report that 8GB graphics cards are safe in Black Myth: Wukong, at least without path tracing. Even at 4K with the Cinematic preset, the RTX 4080 drew just 7GB of video memory and 12GB of system memory. Of course, that number jumps up considerably with path tracing turned on, but you really shouldn’t turn on path tracing with an 8GB graphics card anyway.
I suspect the low VRAM utilization comes down to the level of detail in Black Myth: Wukong. Particularly at lower graphics settings, the game’s draw distance is extremely low. I’ve only played through the opening hours of the game, so it’s possible there are more open areas later that stress VRAM usage — I’m not sure right now. Assuming the game continues on a fairly linear pace, however, I don’t expect 8GB graphics cards will run into issues.
Crashing on 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs
Intel’s instability fiasco continues with Black Myth: Wukong. Despite delivering its long-awaited microcode update, Intel’s 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs may still crash in the game with an “out of video memory” error. The developers say this can happen during shader compilation, and it has posted a topic on Steam about how to bypass the issue.
I wasn’t able to re-create any crashes, but if you’re having issues with a 13th-gen or 14th-gen CPU, this could solve the problem. Hopefully the developers are putting out the post for anyone who missed the microcode update, and users that have already upgraded can play without issue.
Black Myth: Wukong on PC — the verdict
Black Myth: Wukong will push your PC hard. There’s no doubt about that. It can tax even hardware as powerful as the RTX 4090, but it doesn’t have to. There’s a ton of range in the graphics settings, as well as all of the latest PC gaming tech. The game is fairly well optimized, too, running smoothly on a variety of hardware and scaling to accommodate CPUs and GPUs of different levels.
Still, it’s not perfect. Ray Reconstruction is a missed opportunity, and the graphics menu, despite being robust, doesn’t always guide users in the right direction. The focus on upscaling can be problematic, too, particularly for players running 1080p monitors. The developers could rope off the Cinematic settings more, making it clear that this level is truly restricted for the most high-end hardware.
